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Thursday, July 02, 2015

I went to a public high school in coastal Florida. It was early-to-mid 70s, and the cutting edge of education theory and practice looked different than it does now. I'd always heard – although I have no actual proof – that the state of Florida used my school as their experimental site. Try it there first.

We started the day at 7 something and ended at 12:30. Our dress code, as I remember it, prohibited only bathing suits and midriff exposure. We had modular scheduling and open campus, which means we could go to the beach or out for breakfast if we had a long enough open period between classes, which there often was. (We also could use the open periods to study, the model's initial hope.) We could be done for the day by mid-morning if we scheduled our classes tightly in the early hours. But we had good teachers with high academic expectations and lots of opportunity for civic involvement. An interesting combination of rigor and laxity.

I just returned from a weekend-long high school reunion. My fortieth. I've been gone a long time – we all have – so I didn't know what to expect. The points of commonality with old classmates fade with the years, after all, and forty years is substantial. I figured if I only spent time with a couple of my closer friends and some time on the beach, the trip would be worthwhile. I was wrong because the weekend was so much more.

When I was in high school I had a lack of imagination about who people were inside and about what people could become, about the ways we could succeed and the ways we could be broken, about the ways that many already had been broken, even at 16. I didn't yet comprehend the complexity of human life.

Maybe that's the nature of being a teenager. Thankfully the nature of being mid-to-late 50s is that we've all lived a lot of life by now. The complexity of human life is no longer hidden. We are each of us, all of us, making our way.

Old friends and new-old friends, we talked late into the night (OK, early morning). We laid on the beach. Joked about our middle-age bodies and swimsuits. Bobbed in the Gulf. Reminisced. Prayed. Spoke of the future. Confided. Laughed. Laughed. Laughed. We spoke into each other's lives. Maybe that last thing is what surprised me most: that people who have been apart for decades have the power to speak into each other's lives by virtue of the fact of knowing each other growing up.

It felt sheer privilege to be back among these men and women I came of age with, to see such sparkle and verve, to feel a crazy inexplicable bond and love, even with those I hadn't known well, to witness what people have become and overcome.

Being in the presence of people I knew at the age of 13 or 15 expanded me. My life feels longer than it did last week, as if a thread that had been twisted to a knot at its end was untwisted and laid out straight again to reflect its true length, end to end.

My gratitude for the good that came from a high school operating on a misguided educational model is deep. My imagination over what people can become and what we can overcome and the ways that God works in all our lives is bubbling.

[Photo: a yearbook picture taken of me senior year by Bobby Whitlatch, copied now with my cell phone; evidence that I studied – usually – during those open periods. I still remember what I was wearing in this picture; you can't see them, but I was wearing burgundy and white plaid pants, which I sewed myself. Yes, burgundy and white plaid.]

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Patheos Public Square is hosting a panel discussion on “Slow Living: Choosing an Unhurried Life.” You may find something of interest there to help you launch your summer. The ten panelists come from multiple faith traditions and a variety of cultural settings and so have unique insights as to what it means to slow down.

My friend Denise Frame Harlan has a piece (“They Say It Goes Fast But I’m Not So Sure") about the need to withdraw and take a slow pace in order to meet the needs of her children, and how that pace has had unseen benefits in her spiritual and writing life although at a professional and financial cost. (By the way, Denise is currently working on a book about her family’s story of finding affordable living in New England. I’ve read a chapter; it’s wonderful.)

“I owe a great deal to that earlier mom-training in solitude. I needed to step away from the social buzz, to step toward my family, and myself. It was hard, every day, but it crystallized my desire to connect more deeply through writing. The Quiet Hour became a life practice, a form of prayer. Writing became a form of prayer. I would not have chosen this path had I dawdled at those beautiful parties, talking.”

Christine Valters Paintner, from Abbey of the Arts, calls our attention to “in-between times” in “The Practice of the Holy Pause.” I love this concept: taking 10 minutes or 5 long breaths or allowing some threshold of pause between activities.

“The holy pause calls us to a sense of reverence for slowness, for mindfulness, and for the fertile dark spaces between our goals where we can pause and center ourselves, and listen. We can open up a space within for God to work. We can become fully conscious of what we are about to do rather than mindlessly completing another task.”

Michelle Wilbert writes about savoring. In “Coming to Our Senses: Savoring as Spiritual Practice," Wilbert shares what she’s learned from poet Mary Oliver about cultivating “a way of life that daily brings one to the threshold of joy.” About the practice of savoring, Wilbert writes:

“Unattached to an ideology or a particular religious expression, it's the spiritual practice of being fully alive and relishing the experience for exactly that; it's a practice of "enough" — it is enough to be here and to feel the presence of life in our bodies. Savoring is the experiential cornerstone of being fully alive and fully acknowledging and taking joy in the mundane….”

If you want to read more from the panel during a pause in your day, here’s the link.

[Photo: taken of a spot on the shore of Lake Superior at Gooseberry Falls State Park, at which my oldest son sat – on the second rock ledge down – and played guitar once long ago during a family camping trip. A beautiful pause; savoring the memory.]

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

A couple years ago, I wrote a guest post for Good Letters blog in the months following the Newtown school shooting and the Boston bombs. You can read that post here: "Deliver Us From Evil." If you haven't read it, this post may not make much sense, so if you have the time, I encourage you to click over and then come back.

That post at Good Letters has now been on my mind in the days following the Charleston shooting, because last week I realized I'd gotten out of the habit of that specific prayer: a prayer for deliverance from evil on behalf of this country, this world. In that post I stated that I was setting my alarm for a certain time each morning and would pause at the ring to say a prayer of corporate protection, adding my small prayer to all the prayers.

I’ve set the alarm on my phone to go off thirty minutes after I usually get up. It’s set to repeat daily. When it goes off with its blues guitar sound, I am praying for the safety of this country, our schools, skies, and public places, for the safety of the world, for protection of the innocents.

I had kept the practice going for a long time, but more and more often I turned off the alarm because of a work conference call, or travel, or any number of legitimate – or not so legitimate – excuses, until one day after turning it off, I forgot to turn it back on.

Right before a vacation, my mental stress seems to peak. I can hardly concentrate or generate ideas. It is hard to think a thought through to completion. I want to leave my mind’s contents on my desk alongside my papers. I long to lie on a beach with an empty mind, using it only to read the novels packed in my bag.

Once en route, I want to escape immediately to vacation mind-set. I try hard not to think about anything required of me. This attitude prevails for some time into the vacation. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, my mind is piqued by some remembrance of a project, goal, or interest. I may even visit a bookstore and come away not with an escapist paperback but a serious book about that project, goal, or interest. Eventually I take out my notebook and write down an idea. I’ll do such and so when I get back, I think. I get excited.

This pattern of revival is confirmed by Anne Morrow Lindberg in Gift From the Sea: “At first, the tired body takes over completely. As on shipboard, one descends into a deck-chair apathy . . . And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense—no—but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach.”

What accounts for the transformation from a prevacation squeezed-shut mind to a mind open like a sponge? Quite simply, a true and solid break (as opposed to a break of the sort that can be as full of requirement, action, and chaos as any other day). A solid break is a time in which the mind can empty itself of overused and boring thoughts. A time in which the superfluous can boil off, leaving a rich core concentrate.

During a solid break, the tedium can be forgotten and mental ruts washed smooth. The original passion of projects and goals can refuel the energy that the extensive “to-do lists” associated with them have spent.

During a solid break, you can take back your mind to do with as you please. You can use it yourself or just let it exist. Let it lie with you on a beach chair. Let it move only when it’s ready.

Without downtime, the mind becomes as ineffective as a muscle that is continually contracted or a sponge that is never squeezed out. Solid breaks of one, two, or more weeks probably provide maximum recovery time, but shorter breaks and daily downtimes, in the form of relaxation and an adequate night’s sleep, are also valuable and critical.

Shockingly, a weekly day of rest has the same stature within the Ten Commandments as the admonition against murder. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath, to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work...” A weekly day of rest, in full knowledge of bills to be paid and work on the desk, of towels to be washed and groceries to be bought. A weekly day of rest taken freely, proactively, worshipfully, without guilt. Rejuvenation as commandment, not luxury.

Monday, June 15, 2015

My husband is at a work-related conference today and tomorrow. He's looking for what's next for him. I would guess that a substantial proportion of the one thousand or so expected attendees are also looking for what's next. A conference is the place to go for that, because you never know what can happen there. You put yourself in a space vibrating with people and ideas, a sociologic Brownian motion scenario, and you just might encounter someone or something that will change your life. Of course, there are the strategic how-tos of conference attendance – the networking dos and don'ts you can find on a Google search – but following those can't account for the serendipitous, magical, dare I say divinely orchestrated, moments for which you can never plan or sometimes even imagine in advance.

Blessings, this day and every day, on conference goers who move out from their rooms, their offices, their desks, their what's now, and boldly place themselves in position for bumping into what's next.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Finding Livelihood is launched, and I'm doing my best to help it fly high and strong. But I'm also, in the cracks of time between that and client work (a new deck of PowerPoint slides on MS landed on my desk yesterday), I'm also tending to a next creative writing project. Another project that will someday launch, I hope. For now, though, I'm writing a sentence here and a paragraph there, anticipating they will someday lock together like pieces of a puzzle whose picture I can't yet imagine.

Along the way with this new creative project, I'm experimenting with music as a help. I almost always write without background music, but there have been a handful of pieces that bonded themselves to a song or a couple of songs in the rewrite and editing stages.

Following the model of Carolyn See in her book Making A Literary Life, I'm experimenting with proactively assembling a playlist for this new project. Somewhere I read the suggestion, and I'm sorry I can't remember where, to play music subliminally for an evocative yet unobtrusive effect. As I said, I'm experimenting.

Thursday, June 11, 2015

The first book I read by Anne Lamott was Traveling Mercies,which I wrote about in a post back in 2004. While it was dead serious, it was also hysterical. I was reading it as the same time as a friend of mine, and we would call each other and read excerpts over the phone, not being able to finish our sentences for laughing so hard.

I just finished her book, Stitches: A Handbook of Meaning, Hope, and Repair, which came out in 2013. I started it about a year ago but for some reason was interrupted and didn't finish. When I picked it up again a couple weeks ago, I started again from the beginning and was glad for the double dose of her thoughts.

Stitches has Lamott's humorous garnishes, but the tone is more serious than Traveling Mercies. The book is a gathering of "the observations that in troubled times help me find my way once again to what T. S. Eliot called 'the still point of the turning world.'" Her key metaphor is that of stitching together scraps, such as you do when making a quilt, to make something new, whole, and strong.

For your reading pleasure and overall encouragement in life, here are some excerpts:

“Most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice. The equation is: life, death, resurrection, hope.”

~

“When you can step back at moments like these and see what is happening, when you watch people you love under fire or evaporating, you realize that the secret of life is patch patch patch. Thread your needle, make a knot, find one place on the other piece of torn cloth where you can make one stitch that will hold. And do it again. And again. And again.”

~

“Love bats last.”

~

“This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we’re supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.”

~

“The search for meaning will fill you with a sense of meaning. Otherwise life passes by in about seven weeks, and if you are not paying attention and savoring it as it unfurls, you sill wake up one day in deep regret. It’s much better to wake up now in deep regret, desperate not to waste more of your life obsessing and striving for meaningless crap. Because you will have finally awakened.”

Any one of those excerpts, as well as any of several hundred other stand-alone great lines or paragraphs in the book are worthy of writing on an index card or printing out and cutting to the size of your back pocket to carry around for quick and frequent referral.

Tuesday, June 09, 2015

Yesterday morning I read from Oswald Chamber's Utmost for his Highest and some underlining caught my attention. I've had this book for years, since my children were little, and have periodically cycled it in and out of my morning devotional reading. It's not a book I typically underline in – maybe because most of its lines are underline worthy and the whole volume would be a mass of ink – but there are the occasional stretches of blue or black ink under text or squiggles in the margins.

Here is what I found underlined in the reading for yesterday, June 8:

"It is a great deal better to fulfil the purpose of God in your life by discerning His will than to perform great acts of self-sacrifice.... Beware of harking back to what you were once when God wants you to be something you have never been."

I remember those words well but don't remember the time of underlining. I find myself wondering about who I was when I underlined that: what age; what decisions were face me; what soul chord those words touched.

Underlinings and margin notes we once make are like messages through time from a younger self to an older self. Reminders of thoughts that sparked imagination and growth. Flags to pay attention. Witnesses to past difficulties made easier by the encouragement of words. Markers of the journey.

This could be an interesting exercise. Pick from your bookshelf a devotional book or any book that's been especially meaningful to you and thumb through it until you find a note or underlining you made years ago. Try and remember when you made the marking, who you were then, and why those words were significant. Think about what message the words may be sending you today.

By day I'm a freelance medical writer. After hours I do another kind of work. Creative writing, spiritual writing, essaying. This blog arises from those after hours. I write about work/vocation, meaning, hope, imagination, faith, science, creativity/writing, books, and anything else I feel the impulse to write about. I hope these short posts provide camaraderie for your own creative and spiritual life.

Aiming at the intersections of thought, faith, imagination, and beauty in everyday life.